Video Game / Phantom Brigade

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A Real-Time with Pause Genre Mashup Mini-Mecha Turn-Based Tactics game, Phantom Brigade follows the story of the eponymous Phantom Brigade, a special operations unit turned freedom fighters as they seek to reclaim the conquered Republic of Fyrland from the Kaskad Dominion after a sudden invasion. Faced with overwhelming odds, the Brigade has one advantage on its side; a prototype system that grants every unit five seconds of Combat Clairvoyance. With it, they might just stand a chance - if they can fight their way to the capital and overthrow the occupation.

How do you Genre Mashup Real-Time with Pause and Turn-Based Tactics? Simple; each turn consists of five seconds of real-time combat, interspersed with pauses to use the planning system. During this paused time, the player is able to 'scrub' back and forth across the next five seconds to observe every planned enemy action - and plan their own actions accordingly. Sounds like it might make things too easy? Well, you're up against an entire army for starters...

It entered Epic Early Access on November 16, 2020 and had its full release on February 28, 2023. The 2.0 update released on November 20, 2025 and dramatically overhauled wide swaths of the game, including pilot mechanics, campaign progression and various quality-of-life elements.

According to our predictive prototype, the game will provide examples of:

• The '90s: According to the Lore Codex, the Annexation of Fyrland happened in April/March 1992, and the game proper begins somewhere around 1995. The advanced technologies and Humongous Mecha running around are chalked up to the radically different history of the setting's Fictional Earth. The world's even going through it's own equivalent of the Post-Peak Oil scare, which motivates Kaskad's occupation of Fyrland.
• Ace Custom: Each of your own units will eventually end up as an Ace Custom in order to suit the pilot's skills, based on whatever equipment you can steal, salvage, or trade for.
• Action Bomb: Drone units, which are bombs on quad-props. They'll approach player units and detonate when they get close enough.
• Alien Sky: The moon of Phantom Brigade's Fictional Earth was destroyed millions of years ago, leaving Earth with a glimmering ring visible from the surface. The proliferation of orbital micro-debris has rendered attempts at orbital spaceflight nearly impossible, with most space programs ending in failure.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The Fyrland Freedom Forces (3F), the resistance army made up of Fyrland Defence Service remnants and civilian volunteers.
• All Up to You: Subverted. The titular Brigade is part of a much larger war effort to free the Fyrland, requiring 3F troops to secure liberated areas. As the vanguard of said operation, however, it more often than not acts as the decisive factor.
• Alternate History: The divergence happens around 350 million years ago, when the Moon's orbit was disrupted by a passing stellar body, causing it to be shattered by tidal forces and bombard the Earth's surface. While humanity still emerges down the line and develops along similar lines to our history, the presence of readily available helium-3 and rare earths deposited by said impacts is what heavily motivates Kaskad's invasion in the first place.^note In 1.0 the key event was instead at the end of the Cretaceous, in which the dinosaurs weren't wiped out by a single impact, but "multiple".
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The Contracts system allows you to take remote control of randomly generated allied squadrons fighting elsewhere in Fyrland. While contract missions won't net you any battlefield salvage or experience points (since your squad isn't participating), you do get some guaranteed rewards as payment, with no risk to your campaign progress.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: No matter how many pilots and mechs you have on standby aboard the Mobile Base, you can only ever field a squad of four at a time.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range: Largely averted; weapons can be fired at a target no matter the range, but will deal less damage if the target is too close or too far away, with the effectiveness indicated next to the reticle/selector. Shotguns and machine guns suffer from this fairly hard due to shots spreading out, but it's also used to enforce Competitive Balance where sniper rifles deal less damage to targets that are too close. Missile launchers are the exception; they have both a fixed maximum range and a fixed minimum range, preventing you from issuing targetting orders to enemies beyond them.
• Attack Drone: Kaskad forces will occasionally field car-sized unmanned drones in combat. Being too small and lightweight to carry mech-scale weapons, drones' sole means of attack is to fly into things and explode.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Heavy Mechs are big, beefy with more integrity than light and medium mechs. But their speed takes a giant nose dive due to their colossal mass, and their heat capacity is also lowered meaning they can't fire weapons as often. As the game favors a lot proper positioning to get the best of your enemy who generally field better mechs and weapons, heavy mechs tend to fair far less well. Their integrity is also not that much higher than medium mechs, so they don't perform that well as tanks. There's some niche use like making them ram into enemies as collision effects are dependent on weight, but generally medium mechs perform better.
• Back Stab: Whilst units don't take more direct/physical damage when attacked from behind, they do take more concussion damage; this is damage to the pilot, and if it maxes out then they're knocked unconscious for the remainder of combat. This is the best way to get salvage, as mechs often don't have to be badly damaged for the pilot to be knocked out.
• Barrier-Busting Blow: The bulldozer thruster is a specialized Jump Jet Pack which, after a moment to rev up, launches the mech horizontally to tear through any building unfortunate enough to be in its path. This isn't without risk, as the mech becomes destabilized the longer it remains in contact with building geometry, which can cause it to crash. This is based on the mech's weight class, so heavier mechs can tear through bigger buildings without losing their footing.
• Base on Wheels: Part of why the Brigade is able to fight as they do is their special Mobile Base. Outfitted with optical camouflage and manufacturing and maintenance facilities, it serves as your home through the campaign. It won't stop enemy patrols from spotting you if you get too close to them, but it's enough to avoid full retaliation. In 1.0 the base was an adapted mining mech transport; 2.0 RetCons it as one of a type of dedicated mobile maintenance facilities that would travel between far-flung outposts, intended to compensate for Fyrland's relative lack of mech infrastructure.
• BFS: The largest melee weapons are huge, though they're not quite to absurd proportions.
• Boring, but Practical: Assault Rifles are aggressively average, especially in comparison to more exotic weapons. They can't inflict status effects like high-tech energy weapons, shoot through terrain like railguns or arc over cover like missile launchers. However, they are very lightweight in comparison, have good range, deal decent amounts of unit, structure and pilot damage and produce very little heat, allowing them to be fired more often. While other weapons are more situational, it is very rare to encounter a scenario where fielding a mech with an Assault Rifle is the wrong choice.
• Bottomless Magazines: In full effect; units never need to stop and reload their weapons, no matter how many shots they fire (and an HMG-equipped unit could easily burn hundreds of rounds in a single encounter with the right setup). Instead you have to manage Overheating.
• Car Fu: The AI tank drivers are reckless to the extreme, and will often attempt to ram or just drive through your units. Unfortunately for them, all but the lightest mechs will handily beat tanks in a collision.
• Character Class System: The 2.0 overhaul adds classes for pilots, as well as a selection of perks for them to gain as they level up: Engineers, Sharpshooters, Protectors and Interceptors. There are also Rookies, which change into one of the four main classes after they get their first level-up. When a pilot maxes out at level 5, they can choose to prestige and reset their progression with a randomized list of new perks to learn, permanently keeping one of their previous perks and discarding the rest.
• Collateral Damage: Noteworthy in the Liberation missions, where avoiding such is a requirement for mission success. Takeover missions don’t require you to minimize damage, but recommend it to help Fyrland’s post-war recovery and obtain more rewards.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Player projectiles/effects are blue, enemy projectiles/effects are orange. Kaskad Dominion mechs always have some amount of red paint, and are given hostile red icons on the interface. Fyrland Freedom Front mechs use green-dominant paint jobs and are given green interface elements. On convoy intercept missions, the vehicles and mechs hauling cargo are painted yellow and given yellow interface markers to distinguish them from their escorts. The Phantom Brigade is associated with blue in the interface, and their experimental mechs in the prologue are blue and black, but the player is otherwise free to color their roster of mechs however they like.
• Combat Clairvoyance: Exactly five seconds of it. As you can see the AI's every action, much of the gameplay stems from how you react and mitigate those actions; timing your attacks to not be countered by their shields, raising your shield or maneuvering behind cover to counter their attacks, and so on. 2.0 goes even further by adding where air and artillery strikes are going to hit so you can move out of the way before you suffer Death from Above.
• Crosshair Aware: Part of the above Combat Clairvoyance is the ability to see when enemies are making attacks, and exactly what their effective range is, with a big cone. This is vital for minimizing the damage your units will take, either by ensuring they're outside that effective range, have their shield up if they have one, or behind cover.
• Dangerous Orbital Debris: The Moon of Phantom Brigade's Fictional Earth broke up millions of years ago, giving Earth a dense ring of lunar debris that has made spaceflight and satellite technology almost impossible to achieve. On the plus side, all that moon rock falling to Earth left it with tons of helium-3 and rare earth metals, leading to the development of Humongous Mecha and other advanced technologies.
• Day of the Jackboot: Kaskad's rule over Fyrland is shown to be oppressive and overbearing, its propaganda insisting that its draconian measures are only temporary and that the people will welcome their new way of life. In-game, this also translates into occupied settlements being dilapidated landscapes strewn with propaganda and imposing military structures.
• Defiant to the End: Enemy units will decide to pull the plug and eject/surrender when things go bad for them, allowing player to take their equipment. However, some will fight to the death no matter how badly beaten up they are, that you’re best destroying them before they cause any more trouble.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Flak Cannons and the Firestarter model Heavy Pistols are fairly hard to use, as they fire a small number of explosive projectiles per Attack. Whilst they hit very hard per shot and in a decent area-of-effect (allowing them to damage multiple parts or even units with a single shot) friendly fire and self damage alike are serious risks, and it's entirely possible for all shots to miss.
• Dual Wielding: You can absolutely arm your mechs with paired handguns or SMGs, though sadly you can't fire them both simultaneously right now. You can also go Sword and Gun, backing up melee weapons with sidearms.
• Early Game Hell: While the campaign does ease you in on what to expect, you're nonetheless forced to make do with only meager resources and a handful of mechs at the start, against enemies who can take your forces out with ease if one's careless.
• Ejection Seat: Every mech comes with one as standard, as it also serves as the cockpit. Forcing enemies to eject, usually by destroying their arms/weapons, is one of the various ways to get salvage. Vehicles can simply Surrender instead, though this is rare.
• Elite Army: Downplayed. The Brigade is explicitly described as a spec-ops unit that's received substantial training and support since the invasion, and that is before they even return to Fyrland. Despite being just a comparatively small contingent, it could nonetheless hold its own against much larger opponents, thanks to the predictive tech that grants them a measure of Combat Clairvoyance.
• Elite Mooks: Kaskad has several separate 'divisions', the main ones being the Reserves, Army, Experimental, and Spec Ops. Spec Ops naturally serve as the Elite Mooks of the forces and are typically the best-equipped and most dangerous of the lot, and crop up more as you get into higher-level territories.
• The Empire: The Kaskad Dominion, Fyrland's oligarchic eastern neighbor. It already had a history of occupying neighboring territories, which led to a breakdown in trade relations and an economic downturn. The ruling families increased military spending almost ten-fold over a decade as unemployment and poverty surged, and eventually sought to conquer Fyrland for its resources.
• Equipment-Based Progression: Whilst pilots have their own skill and progression system, most of your progression is based off equipment levels and rarity. The level acts as a multiplier or modifier for the base statistics (so a Level 10 torso has noticeably more Integrity than a Level 1 torso) whilst rarity adds additional slots for subsystems and inherent modifiers.
• Equipment Upgrade: Mech parts can be upgraded to increase their level, up to three times, allowing gear from earlier zones to remain useful for at least a little while. Your ability to upgrade parts is tied to the level of your workshop, which is improved by scrapping parts of higher levels.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: In addition to myriad Scandinavian and Baltic influences, Fryland's highly-organized Freedom Forces (originally called the Home Guard) and the citizenry's stubborn defiance call to mind Poland during the Second World War. The 2.0 update further adds to this with its enemy being the Kaskad Dominion, a massive superpower and military state lead by an oligarchy similar to Post-Soviet, Pre-Putin Russia.
• Fictional Earth: According to the Lore Codex, the Moon fell out of its stable orbit and broke up millions of years ago, with the resulting bombardment causing a mass extinction and leaving rich deposits of helium-3 and rare earth metals. This not only altered Earth's geography and the course of human history, but also humanity's technological development: Besides the proliferation of Humongous Mecha, the ring of lunar debris encircling the Earth makes spaceflight and satellite technology nearly impossible, so long-distance communication is limited to radio and aerostatic relays.
• Fog of War: On top of undetected enemy units, this also manifests in how your Combat Clairvoyance can still work past five seconds, at the cost of significant uncertainty.
• Fragile Speedster: Lightweight units can run far and boost around effortlessly, but their fragility demands that the player moves them with care and precision, to avoid enemy fire and collisions.
• Government in Exile: Not unlike Fryland's real life inspirations, there's an overseas effort by those who managed to escape the initial invasion to not only support the Fryland Freedom Forces, but also the titular Brigade.
• Hand Cannon: Heavy pistols, but particularly the Blast and Firestarter models; the Blasts are shotgun pistols, and the Firestarters fire large explosive rounds.
• Harpoon Gun: The Stake Launcher weapon type is a rifle that fires a mech-sized, rocket-propelled harpoon that causes targets to crash and ragdoll, pushing them around and even pinning them against buildings.
• Hero Insurance: Defied. In Liberation missions (where you fight inside a town full of people's homes), you are required do as little damage to buildings as possible, or you will have to either pay in resources or abort the mission. You're also asked (though not required) to show similar restraint during Takeover missions, since the industrial facilities you're fighting over could be used to help Fyrland's economy recover after the war.
• Hot Blade: The "saber" melee weapon type features superheated blades which inflict the burning debuff on targets, causing damaged units to overheat. As a consequence they also run hotter than most melee weapons, forcing you to invest in decent cooling to use sabers effectively.
• Humongous Mecha: The "Units" are about three storeys tall, dwarfing the tanks they fight alongside. Behemoths meanwhile are gargantuan war machines that make your mechs look tiny, and they serve as Boss Battles in certain provinces.
• Item Crafting: The workshop aboard the Mobile Base can fabricate mech parts, provided you've dismantled enough prior copies to unlock the recipe. Each rank of rarity needs to be unlocked separately (so to craft a chosen part with blue rarity, you need to scrap blue versions of that specific part), and the level is determined by the level of the workshop (improved by scrapping enough parts of higher levels in every part category). The workshop is also where you construct the chassis for brand new mech units, using unit cores.
• Invisibility Cloak: The Empire being unable to pin down the Brigade's crawler is handwaved away as being due to "cloaking tech". It's not flawless, as patrols will be able to spot and pursue you if you get too close to them.
• Jump Jet Pack: After you get out of the lowest tiers, it's exceedingly rare (if not impossible) to find a torso unit that doesn't have Thrusters. Whilst they don't permit true flight, they do permit rocket-based boosting. This generates heat, but it's generally faster than running and can help you get to places you otherwise couldn't, such as on top of buildings.
• Killed Off for Real: Pilots can suffer a limited number of traumas (gained when concussed or caught in an exploding mech) before they get killed off permenantly. Same goes for your mechs, which accrue "fractures" when destroyed in battle until they're left beyond repair.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Knowing when to retreat from a combat zone, whether or not you succeed in your objectives, can be just as important as fighting the enemy.
• La Résistance: In addition to the Brigade itself, there's the Government in Exile-backed Fyrland Freedom Forces (3F)^note formerly simply named the Home Guard, comprised of guerilla fighters and what's left of the Fyrland Defence Service.
• Luck-Based Mission: One downside of contracts is that you're given a completely random team of 3F mechs, which can make certain mission types with stringent loadout requirements almost impossible (such as demolition missions where the randomized mechs lack weapons capable of blowing up buildings). Fortunately, contracts have no consequences for failure beyond losing out on their fixed rewards.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Giant metal shields make up one of the left-arm slot options, and come in both heavy and light variants suited for assault units or for faster skirmisher units respectively. Equipping one gives the mech an action specifically for bracing the shield in a chosen direction, allowing shield-bearing units to block enemy fire and serve as improvised cover for teammates. Raising the shield also increases the mech's weight class, allowing them to better withstand collisions.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Many of the missile-launch systems in the game launch several missiles per salvo. There's even an achievement for having a hundred missiles in the air in a single turn (i.e. within five seconds).
• Malevolent Masked Men: Unlike the varied headgear of the heroic Fyrland pilots, pilots of the Kaskad Dominion wear blocky, high-tech helmets that completely hide their eyes, serving to dehumanize them as Mooks of The Empire.
• Men of Sherwood: Some missions will give you reinforcements from the Fyrland Freedom Force, ranging from mechs to tanks, distinguished from your team by green markers. They'll act independently by default, but you can take manual control to better coordinate them with your pilots.
• Mighty Glacier: Any mech made with lots of Heavy parts will tend to be this, capable of winning collisions against any other weight class, though with the right parts it might be possible to make a Lightning Bruiser out of them instead.
• More Dakka: Most weapons fire maybe one or two dozen projectiles per attack cycle at most. Machine guns can fire up to fifty. They make a suitably fitting brrrrrt sort of sound when doing so. Expect any target in their effective range to be rapidly shredded.
• No Name Given: Originally the Homeland was only ever referred to as such, and The Empire's actual name was likewise never explicitly stated. The 2.0 update named them the Fyrland Republic and the Kaskad Dominion, respectively.
• Norse by Norsewest: All the county and location names (apart from military bases) give a very Scandinavian/Baltic feel to Fyrland, in contrast to the Russian/Slavic-like Kaskad.
• Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: A lot of the heavier weapons are very boxy, particularly the heavier shotguns, machine guns, and sniper rifles.
• Overheating: Firing weapons and using thrusters will generate heat; if heat exceeds the unit's capacity it'll take a percentage amount of damage from their total health per second until it cools below threshold. Units that take too much heat damage may auto-eject, and even if they don't that damage will need to be repaired later. This can be offset by installing Capacitors (which increase the overheat threshold) and Heatsinks (which cause units to cool faster).
• Post-Peak Oil: The world of Phantom Brigade is currently predicting this sort of scenario in regards to exotic isotopes such as helium-3; which are abundant on the Fictional Earth, but are now determined to be much less than was originally estimated. While there's still enough to "keep civilian reactors running for hundreds of years", it's bad news in the long term for industries and advanced technologies that banked on the original estimates, such as the Humongous Mecha that dominate Earth's militaries. The Kaskad Dominion invested heavily in refineries during the boom period, and the change of fortunes is causing their economy to spiral; the annexation of neighbouring Fyrland, which has abundant helium-3 deposits, is Kaskad's attempt to keep itself afloat.
• Prescience by Analysis: The basis of the Phantom Brigade's Combat Clairvoyance is an experimental probability analysis system that can predict unfolding events on the battlefield within the next five seconds, using advanced ballistics calculations and simulated human behavior. It does have some limits — actions that span beyond the fifth second cannot be seen accurately until the next cycle, and the system can't predict the results of the pilot's own choices. The founding members of the Phantom Brigade were testing the analysis system at the time of the Annexation of Fyrland, and they managed to escape the chaos with the valuable prototypes installed in their mechs.
• Punched Across the Room: Not quite punched, but the heaviest melee weapons are all but guaranteed to stagger and knock down victims even without leg breaks, potentially sending them crashing through buildings or tumbling to the ground. Lighter blades can be used for consecutive strikes or careful hit and run attacks, but sometimes interrupting an enemy's entire action is a more effective tactic.
• Ramming Always Works: Colliding with other mechs deals damage depending on the weight class of both mechs — mechs of equal or lighter tonnage will lose control and collapse, losing their prepared actions from that point. This makes it viable for medium and heavy mechs to charge into lighter mechs to disrupt them, and even light mechs can kick around ultralight vehicles in a pinch. Shields can help a mech withstand collisions, as raising the shield makes them count as one weight class higher than normal and can absorb some of the impact, allowing them to shoulder-check mechs of the same weight without endangering themselves.
• Ragdoll Physics: Full ragdoll physics kick in when mechs lose control, which is usually caused by the pilot being knocked out or ejecting, or by collisions. Mechs and tanks can go sliding around the battlefield if rammed with a dash action, pinballing off one another or crashing through entire buildings.
• Randomly Generated Loot: While enemy loadouts and mission rewards are largely pre-determined, every part in a mech has a random serial number, and multiple copies of the same part are diversified through levels, Color-Coded Item Tiers, built-in perks, pre-slotted components and tiny stat variations.
• Real Robot Genre: Mech units are military hardware fielded alongside tanks and occasionally air support, though they're powerful and nimble enough that mundane vehicles are seriously outclassed. The technology is also standardized enough that your forces can strip fallen Kaskad mechs for parts and attach them to your own mechs without difficulty.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Parts can have Integrity (Health, static), and Barrier (Shield, regenerating). Typically parts that have Barrier have significantly lower Integrity and often lower total effective health compared to an all-Integrity component, but with the added bonus of regenerating if the unit goes undamaged for a brief time, drawing on a finite pool of "fixfoam".
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Blast off the weaponry of Mechs without destroying them, and they will bail out with an ejector pod rather than get themselves killed. This allows the rest of the mech to be salvaged more cheaply.
• Shield Bash: Whilst you can't explicitly shield bash right now, you can still order a unit to walk into the path of another with their shield up. Doing so will cause the shield to take the brunt of the impact, and the lighter of the two units (the shielded unit counts as one weight class higher than normal) will be staggered or knocked down. This gives you a very effective means of interrupting enemy actions, as the automatic crashing action immediately overrides whatever they were doing.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: Enemy units can make use of shields as well. They don't actively block very often, but the big slab of metal can still absorb damage from the front and holding side, encouraging flanking attacks.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Shotguns have the shortest range of all weapons, but do devastating amounts of damage within their bracket, be they pocket-sized shotgun pistols, slow-firing pump shotguns, or rapid-fire semi-automatics that spray out multiple waves of shot.
• Slasher Smile: If you examine enemy mechs, you'll quickly notice that generic Kaskad pilots are always wearing a wide smirk, which looks rather sinister due to their red cockpit lighting and eye-concealing helmets.
• Slave to PR: Downplayed. Being the vanguard in Fyrland's liberation, all eyes from the Government in Exile to the 3F and average civilian are on the Brigade. While your countrymen are generally forgiving given the circumstances, it's still important to keep morale up through decisive battles, careful maneuvering, and avoiding Collateral Damage.
• Socketed Equipment: Higher-level, higher-rarity components can come with slots for swappable components such as heatsinks, capacitors, sensors, and hydraulics, which all improve the mech's performance in various ways. Thrusters, reactor cores and protection for the pilot can be added to torsos. Weapons can be given modifications to their performance, like additional range, demolition damage, or shots-per-volley. The higher the part's rarity, the more open slots you have to work with — common grey parts have all of their components welded in, preventing customization.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The Kaskad forces are divided by not only levels but also subfactions. The Army forces are the standard Mooks, fielding unremarkable weapons and mechs. The Reserves are even less than that, fielding ramshackle civilian-adjacent mechs that use backpack weapons to compensate for missing limbs, and focusing heavily on missile launchers. The Experimental forces are a step above, focusing on exotic weaponry like railguns, plasma, lasers and incendiaries. The Spec Ops are Elite Mooks who exclusively field mechs and prefer to knock out your pilots with concussion damage.
• Spider Tank: Behemoths are often multi-legged. Some ordinary tanks also feature four legs ending in wheels, which can elevate the tank's body for a higher firing position.
• Stationary Boss: In the 2.0 campaign, the third Behemoth is an unmanned Attack Drone, and the 3F briefly hijacks the control signal to send it careening into a Kaskad valley fortress, where it embeds itself in a massive antenna dish. The Behemoth's barrier shielding is still up and invulnerable to your weapons, so the Brigade has to blow up parts of the antenna's electronics to fry its barrier with electrical current, so that the 3F can send an airstrike to collapse the receiver on top of the Behemoth. While you're trying to set this up, the Behemoth's weapons are still online and saturating the surrounding area with rocket salvos and cannon fire.
• Sticks to the Back: Some stowed weapons will visibly stick to the mech's back or hover next to their thigh.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: An enemy unit can be the last one on the field, surrounded by four mechs in good condition, with its own legs and one arm destroyed... and they'll still stand and fight rather than eject, as long as they still have at least one weapon to shoot with.
• Subsystem Damage:
  • Each part of a mech (head, chest, left arm, right arm, legs, main weapon, secondary weapon and backpack) has its own health pool. Destroying the torso kills the mech outright, destroying arms or weapons disables those attacks, and destroying legs reduces their movement speed to a limp. The mech's pilot also has a health pool that can be harmed with certain weapons, allowing you to neutralize mechs without severely damaging valuable components.
  • Behemoths have linked health pools for their core health and each of their systems (ranging from massive gun turrets to shields and exposed fuel cells), so destroying them involves blowing up individual parts until the whole thing comes crashing down.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: No matter how well the Brigade performs or how bold its exploits are, it's still just one relatively small unit whose gains could easily be lost if Kaskad sends enough reinforcements. As such, it has to work in tandem with the much larger Fyrland Freedom Force if it hopes to make those victories meaningful.
• Tanks for Nothing: Both Abram-esque battle tanks and Gepard-esque AA tanks are present, alongside more exotic designs mounting mech weapons and sometimes with "legs" that let them stand up for a better firing angle. As you might expect, they are hideously outclassed by the Humongous Mecha - though they don't quite die in a single hit from most weapons, they're easily knocked out if hit from the flank, and any such hit is liable to trash their treads and immobilize them even if it doesn't KO or destroy them. The majority of tanks are also classified as "ultralight", meaning even the most fragile mechs can kick them around to interrupt their turns.
• Variable Mix: Most notable on the overworld view, where music intensity changes based on time of day and whether you're in an occupied or liberated province; it tends to be more subdued and ominous at night in occupied territories, but much more upbeat and inspiring in liberated provinces during the day.
• Video Game Caring Potential: You'll often come across enemy deserters, stranded civilians, and people in need during your fight to save the Homeland. Deserters can be held as prisoners, ignored, or simply released, whilst civilians can be assisted (usually at the cost of time and supplies) or ignored (at the cost of fatigue or hope instead). Doing good deeds costs time and resources but can often lead to better rewards later such as being tipped off to the location of supply caches, so unless you have other pressing matters to attend to like an enemy siege or a patrol chasing you, it's often a good idea to stop and help people.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Liberation Missions demand that you avoid Collateral Damage, for it will cause you fail the mission and harm the morale of the 3F, prolonging and complicating your campaign against the Kaskad occupiers.